severe nerf to PvE Fire Mages

#1 - July 15, 2013, 6:57 p.m.

while I'm sure the recent nerfs to fire mages in the PTR are PvP related you must see that putting them through will drasticly hurt a class/playstyle that has already been hurt so bad it's almost impossible to stay competitive.

Presence of Mind When activated, your next Mage spell with a casting time less than 10 sec becomes an instant cast spell. This spell is not on the global cooldown. and is unaffected by Alter Time. Mage - LvL 15 Talent. Instant. 1.5 min cooldown.

This will basicly make it very difficult to near impossible the get a good combustion tick (good being anything from 20k to 25k ticks), not to mention break the current playstyle the common fire mage uses.

Glyph of Combustion Increases the direct damage, the duration of the damage over time effect and the cooldown of Combustion by 100%. 50%. Major Glyph.

Like I said it's hard enough to get a good combustion going as it is after the last nerf but with this change I suspect 20k ticks will become the new benchmark at the highest your average mage will see. Not to mention that it will be made that it won't line up with the CD of PoM anymore. We all know what will happen, either this glyph will become so undesirable that no one will use it anymore or having PoM will become so undesirable for what ever the "new" playstyle will be that no fire mage will take it.

If this change is PvP motivated I strongly encourage who ever thought this was a good idea to rethink how to go about it and think of a way to do "pvp only" changes liek was done to poly and just rethink it together.

If this is a PvE motivated change then someone over there needs to relook at some numbers because I can think of SO many other class/specs that need to be taken down long before fire mages. And no your top 1% raiding fire mages are NOT the correct mages to look at, they do no represent the majority of us, the AVERAGE fire mage.

Stop breaking PVE damage for the sake of PvP issues.

Lore

Community Manager

#6 - July 15, 2013, 11:44 p.m.

We'll be reverting both of these changes in the next PTR build.

Lore

Community Manager

#29 - July 16, 2013, 12:34 a.m.

Here’s a little more insight into our thinking here (and why the changes even popped up on the PTR in the first place):

We have a few concerns with how Fire is playing out at the moment. Fire scales incredibly well with gear, and we’re worried that they’ll end up doing way too much damage in high end gear. However, we’re trying to avoid just nerfing Fire’s scaling, as that would unfairly hurt any Fire mage who ISN’T in high-end gear.

We’re also worried that Fire is leaning too heavily on perfect cooldown usage. It’s awesome when a highly-skilled player is able to use all of their abilities to the fullest and be rewarded with a little extra damage. It’s significantly less awesome when failing to do so results in a massive loss of DPS. At the moment, Fire is extremely dependent on lining up all of your cooldowns (most notably Alter Time and Presence of Mind) to score massive Combustion damage. If you pull it off, you’re rewarded with a lot of damage. Mess it up, and your performance suffers dramatically. We’d like to tone down the differences between those high and low ends a bit.

We also think that Presence of Mind in particular is just too important to Fire right now. There’s really no choice in that tier – PoM is just too good compared to the other options. We want talents to be a choice.

Those are the issues we’d like to fix, and why the earlier changes hit the PTR to begin with. We may try other methods, or we may decide to just leave things alone for 5.4, but we do want to fix them.

Lore

Community Manager

#187 - July 16, 2013, 5:35 p.m.

We may try other methods, or we may decide to just leave things alone for 5.4, but we do want to fix them.

To expand on this statement a bit since it seems to be causing some confusion:

We may or may not fix the scaling weirdness or the over-reliance on lining up cooldowns in 5.4. That doesn't mean we're just going to let Fire Mages scale into infinity. There will be changes made to keep things under control.